Volume 14, Number 1 & 2 · January 29, 1970
A Narodnik from Lynbrook
By Murray Kempton
Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961
by Whittaker Chambers, edited with Notes by William F. Buckley Jr., Foreword by Ralph De Toledano
The National Review, Inc., in association with Putnam, 303 pp., $6.95
These are the letters Whittaker Chambers wrote to his last and his best—that is, his most respectful—employer. The compliment is less than Mr. Buckley's kindness of nature deserves, since his most conspicuous fellows in the company of Chambers's former employers happen to be Colonel Bykov of the Soviet Secret Police, the late Henry Luce, and John F. X. McGohey, 'then United States Attorney' for the Southern District of New York. These documents will come as a surprise to those persons who think of Chambers as simple and evil, since they begin in 1954 with a warning to Buckley against Senator Joe McCarthy and approach their end in 1959, with Chambers complaining, like any other sensitive American traveling abroad, about the embarrassments inflicted upon the home country by the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Internal Security and by the Strategic Air Command.
Review, 4384 words
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